When you say that Franklin Roosevelt was a Fascist and a traitor folks bristle and laugh at you, because conventional wisdom has it that FDR saved us from Fascism in the 1930's and 40's. He's a hero for Pete's sake, his head is on the dime and there's even a monument to him in DC. However, the fact is that he led this nation down a Fascist path, and the people of his day knew it and opposed it, but all that has been lost in the wash of rewritten history. Nonetheless, we can discern, or at least get a glimpse, of the true history if we are courageous and honest enough to look.
On May 27, 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Schechter decision, which ruled that much of FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act, the NIRA, or NRA, was unconstitutional and must be thrown out. This federal program had inserted the federal government into almost every area of the national economy and was questioned when initiated in 1933, but it took a couple years for the case against it to reach the court.
To hear the voices raised in opposition to FDR's Fascism, voices that have been muted over the years, we have but to look at the opinions on the day following the Court's ruling. The day after the Court’s decision was handed down on May 28, 1935 the New York Times ran almost wall to wall coverage of the Shechter case and its implications for the NRA and indeed, the entire New Deal. In the same edition, they ran a large number of opinions from other newspapers around the nation. Consider this sampling of what those voices had to say at that moment.
From The Des Moines Register, “The high court has by unanimous vote demolished the pretty idea of just delegating to the President, or worse yet to industrial groups, large and undefined lawmaking powers over the economic life of the country. The Register has often made the point that this scheme was pure ‘corporative stateism’ of the kind Mussolini has given Italy. Too many things of too dubious value were done too impetuously and with too little regard for the Constitution back in 1933. The worst and most foolish was NRA.”
From the Los Angeles Times, “The Supreme Court knocks the main foundation stone from under the whole structure of administration policy in its ruling that emergencies do not create constitutional powers and that Congress may not delegate to the President the right to do as he sees fit. Since it is on this plea that most of the New Deal processes of national regimentation have been predicated, the rulings devastatingly inclusive character is obvious. It makes abundantly clear that the days of a virtually uncontrolled one-man dictatorship in the United States are at an end.”
From The St. Paul Pioneer Press, “The decision overthrowing practically all that is vital in the NIRA does far more than merely to invalidate the codes as they stand. It is really notice that the historic and fundamental division of powers between the State and the Federal governments cannot be revised by judicial rewriting of the Constitution. Liberals and conservatives on the bench alike agree that the Constitution does stand as a bulwark against usurpation by the Federal Government of the powers over business and industry which were regarded as the province of the states.”
From The Kansas City Star, “The Constitution is supreme; it cannot be made to mean what it does not say or stretched to cover a broad and virtually unrestricted grant of power even in the name of an emergency. Aside from its constitutional phases, the experience with the operations of the National Industrial Recovery Act demonstrated that on the whole it has retarded recovery. But there were certain features of the codes that ought to be lived up to. Business would make a fatal mistake if it tried to take advantage of the decision to bring back sweat-shop conditions, throw men out of work and return to child labor.”
From The Portland Oregonian, “The Supreme Court has re-established the fact that there is no room within the Constitution for centralized government. Its unanimity even disposes of the prospect that by reorganizing and liberalizing the court, safe conduct could be obtained around constitutional barriers for the power yearnings of young intellectuals of the administration. Attempt by new law to salvage anything from NRA wreckage would be but a forlorn, face saving enterprise. The reverberations of its collapse have shaken AAA, the Securities Bill, the Wagner Labor Disputes Act. ‘Back to the Constitution’ is no longer a forceful slogan. We are there.”
From The Philadelphia Inquirer, “The Supreme Court here epitomizes representative government as it was envisioned by the founders. It establishes the truth that no matter what wrecking crew attempts to destroy the vitality of American principles, it must eventually face the highest legal authority for the ratification of its acts, so long as the Constitution is in force. If the wreckers want to change American doctrine, they must first annul the Constitution, not by indirection or evasion, but by common consent and lawful agreement.”
Finally, even this entry from the New York Herald Tribune made its way onto the pages of the New York Times on this momentous day.
“The consequences of the NRA decision are unquestionably far-reaching. The demise of the Blue Eagle (the symbol of the NRA) is not exactly startling news- the President was about the only one left in Washington who refused to concede its failure and collapse. But the Wagner bill and the AAA amendments seem equally cast out by the logic of the decision. If the term interstate commerce is to be held to its clear meaning as consistently interpreted by the Supreme Court and as now reiterated, then all the clever phraseology by which the New Dealers are seeking to evade the Constitutional clause will be so much vain trickery. The AAA has yet to come before the Supreme Court, and, in so far as it depends upon voluntary cooperation by the individual farmer, it may survive. Yet the trick by which compulsion was applied to the cotton farmer seems a blatant evasion of the Constitution; and the whole device of a processing tax may ultimately go overboard.
“The course of the President remains to be decided. If he is candid and has been sincere in his radical policies he will seek the amendment of the Constitution to alter its basic structure and permit the socialization and regimentation of industry. Thereby would be raised an honest and straightforward issue which could be fought out on its merits. But the blow to the President’s pride is heavy. The damage to his prestige is great. He is shown after two years, by the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, including all its most liberal and progressive members, to have been leading the country down a blind alley.”
Unfortunately, FDR did not move, as some on the Court and in the press suggested, to forthrightly pass a new constitutional amendment giving the federal government the sweeping powers he wanted it to have. Instead of forthrightly calling for a new constitutional amendment to properly delegate the sweeping powers he wanted the federal government to wield, FDR moved in a much more cynical, calculating, and in truth treasonous direction.
During the time between the May 1935 Schechter decision and the election of 1936, he moved rapidly to establish Social Security and compulsory unionism. Even though these programs were as constitutionally dubious as the rejected NRA , he knew that the Court would not be able to rule on their constitutionality before the election, and that the were very popular with the masses.
As the 36 election approached, the Democrat Party, in answer to the Court's ruling, included in its' platform a call for some kind of enabling amendment to be proposed and ratified, so it seemed like things would get back to constitutional normal. With the appeal of the popular new programs bringing out his supporters, and any patriotic qualms subdued by the promise of a new amendment, FDR won by a landslide.
Instead of using his immense political capital to enact that new amendment, he went on the radio on March 9, 1937, to give his Court packing speech as a fire side chat. In it he bemoaned the slow speed and lack of certainty that a new amendment would actually yield the results "we' all want. Instead of either changing his policies to conform to the Constitution as written, or amending the Constitution to properly accommodate his policies, he decided to use his political capital to pack the court with justices who would read the Constitution in the same living, unfaithful way he did.
While the court packing scheme was never followed through, it didn't need to be because the mere threat intimidated the Court into changing its opinion on the fascistic use of the federal government. In a case ruling on March 29, 1937, one of the justices changed his mind regarding the constitutionality of federal economic controls. It went down in history as "a switch in time saves the nine," since the change in the Court's stance made it to where FDR withdrew his proposal to pack the court, leaving the Court to still be composed of just nine justices. That, in retrospect, is the day the Constitution died, becoming a dead, meaningless document useful only as a rationale to advance fascism under the cover that it is now a "living" document, which means it means whatever the Court can convince us it means. What it stopped being when it died is a clear standard that the people can understand and hold the government to.
Finally, we can easily identify FDR's treason by considering how disingenuous he was in the Court packing fireside chat. He moaned about the idea that even if we got some amendment, none could be composed that couldn't be taken to mean whatever the court wanted it to mean. This is totally false because the amendment he should have proposed, the amendment which would have justified all his programs and would not have left any room for questioning its meaning would have been to call for a repeal of the 10th Amendment. By repealing the 10th Amendment, which would require a new amendment to do, we would have taken away the one clear limit on federal power, which would have then enabled the federal government to make laws on any subject.
That call would have ignited a massive national debate, which, given his immense popularity, he would have probably won. We would probably still have continued down this wrongheaded path of fascism, but at least we would have known how we got here, where we had made a wrong turn. FDR did not choose to act in that manner, because it is clear, if we look at it, that he not only wanted to impose fascism on us, but he wanted to do it in a way that severed the connection of the American people to their own Constitution, rendering it into a nebulous, inscrutable document that we don't really feel like we understand.
So FDR was clearly a fascist, and probably the worst traitor in the history of our republic. His administration was a devastating and effective attack on our republic; an attack designed to deprive we, the people of that precious culture that grows out of Local Community Moral Self Government. So our deceived and declining nation hails him as one of our greatest leaders.
